Category:Audiovisual

About

This section, maintained by Valentin Spirik http://www.indiworks.bytebeat.net/, will focus on the how-to and technical aspects of producing audiovisual content using the new P2P autonomous media infrastructure.

This is a Wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki - if you, the reader, have information that you feel is missing and want to share: get involved and help building the P2P Audiovisual section!

Some Basic Resources

Ourmedia's Learning Center is a great place to start learning about podcasting and webcasting: http://www.ourmedia.org/learning-center/open.

This Open media projects list at Ourmedia is a good starting point for exploring a variety of other alternative/participatory media projects on the web: http://www.ourmedia.org/about/open-media-projects.

Beginner's Guide to the AudioVisual P2P Net

Using the net's P2P audiovisual infrastructures can be seen as connecting oneself to a collective mind - an intelligence much smarter than each individual. Here is how it works:

Tools and Platforms

A blog (basically a dynamic homepage, last entries show up first) is an individual's or an organisation's virtual home in the audiovisual P2P net - here a review of blogging tools, providers and some basic blogging introduction: http://www.ojr.org/ojr/stories/050714gardner/. Very popular is the free and open-source wordpress platform: http://wordpress.org/.

New blog entries can be tagged (keywords describing the content) and then be found via blog search engines like technorati http://www.technorati.com/ or smaller but more specialised ones like blogdigger http://www.blogdigger.com/.

An important tool for bloggers is the RSS feed, readers can subscribe to a blog's feed (like to a channel) and will be notified automatically about all updates. Feedburner http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/home is the largest feed management provider and offers a very useful free basic service.

There is a vast choice of "free" services for media hosting - important in this context is the question "Who owns the content?". Since those "free" services all want to make money somehow they all have a "terms of service" or "terms of use agreement" that should be read and understood before uploading media. In most cases "free" means that the service retains the right to alter the user's media and to use it for advertising. Some of the more recent "terms of service" agreements from some of the better known providers seem to be very bad for the users/creators. One of the few safe choices at this point (July '06) for free media hosting are still only the Internet Archive http://www.archive.org/index.php and Ourmedia http://www.ourmedia.org/.

Licences, like the popular Creative Commons licences http://creativecommons.org/ are important for an unbureaucratic online distribution: instead of restricting a user's possibility by reminding him of the copyright, online audio and video gets distributed because users are encouraged to share e.g. a podcast under a certain license.

For musicians/djs specially interesting is ccmixter http://www.ccmixter.org/ - featuring creative commmons licensed samples/remixes and making it easy for artists to focus on the creative part of their work.

The open-source democracy player http://www.getdemocracy.com/, broadcast machine http://www.getdemocracy.com/broadcast and videobomb http://www.videobomb.com/ - all from the participatory culture foundation http://participatoryculture.org/ - are very interesting options for distributing/promoting independent online film and video.

Still in an earlier development, but promissing for independent audio/music distribution is the open-source project songbird http://www.songbirdnest.com/.

This Open media projects list at ourmedia is a good starting point for exploring alternative/participatory web media projects: http://www.ourmedia.org/about/open-media-projects.

A good general resource for audio/video web related topics is the Wikipedia: e.g.: Podcast http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podcast or RSS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_%28file_format%29

How-to

Ourmedia's Learning Center is a great place to start learning about podcasting and webcasting: http://www.ourmedia.org/learning-center/open.

A good place to start learning about videoblogging is http://freevlog.org/.

Theory

The so called "digital revolution" at the end of the 20th century was often exclusively described as a technological revolution - it was going to bring consumers a new "digital" quality (CDs instead of LPs) and advanced productivity to almost every industry. Ten years after the web went mainstream a different picture evolves: consumers turn into producers, we blog about a participatory culture and citizen journalism and we share our media (recommended article: "We Are the Web" by Kevin Kelly, http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.08/tech_pr.html).

Or in short: what was "Power to the people" in the '60 of the last century today is "We are the media" (watch this "Video Mash-up about the Vlogging movement": http://www.ourmedia.org/node/9237).

Useful Software

The VLC Media player http://www.videolan.org/ is a free and open-source video (and audio) player available for all major platforms and capable of playing back most of the video formats found online. The latest release now also offers transcoding (though this seems not to work yet on the OS X version, VLC 0.8.5). The VLC can also be used as a streaming server http://www.videolan.org/streaming/.

The MPlayer http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/news.html is "The Movie Player for Linux", but there is also the MPlayer OS X http://mplayerosx.sourceforge.net/.

The open-source Democracy Player http://www.getdemocracy.com/ brings independent internet tv (and using the broadcast machine http://www.getdemocracy.com/broadcast/ anyone can publish media - also via torrent). Since the latest version (July '06) now also supports drag and drop the Democracy Player becomes an interesting alternative for use as the main media player. Available for all major platforms.

FireAnt http://fireant.tv/ is - like the Democracy Player or Apple's Itunes - a feed aggregator, meaning a user can subscribe to a particular channel via a publisher's RSS feed and the app will automatically download the latest episode of a particular programme. FireAnt is specially popular with videobloggers, but also happens to be one of the best ways of playing back downloaded .flv flash videos. (KeepVid http://keepvid.com/ lets users download flash videos from sites like YoutTube.) Available for Windows and Mac OS X.

Ogg Vorbis http://www.vorbis.com/ (for audio) and Ogg Theora http://www.theora.org/ (for video) are open-source alternatives for media encoding, also interesting for commercial online publishing since they are patent free and no license fees will have to be paid.

ffmpeg x http://www.ffmpegx.com/ is a popular shareware programme for transcoding video on the Mac, maybe not a tool that is easy to use, but works well once configured to one's needs.

Audacity http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ is an open-source audio editor, available for all major platforms.

The Gimp http://www.gimp.org/ is an open-source image manipulation programme, available for all major platforms. To make the transition easier for Photoshop users there is also the GimpShop http://www.plasticbugs.com/index.php?p=241.

Inkskape http://www.inkscape.org/ is an open-source vector graphics editor, available for all major platforms.

Jashaka http://www.jahshaka.org/ is "The worlds first OpenSource Realtime Editing and Effects System", available for all major platforms.

Blender http://blender3d.org/cms/Home.2.0.html is an open-source 3D modelling/animation programme, available for all major platforms.

Audiovisual P2P Related Media

Who Owns Culture? by Lawrence Lessig, 20 min. 5 sec., Google Video (via Videobomb): http://www.videobomb.com/posts/show/2121

Copyright Criminals Preview, 10 min. 29 sec.: http://www.archive.org/details/criminal02mov

We Are The Media, a Video Mash-up about the Vlogging movement, 2 min. 20sec.: http://www.ourmedia.org/node/9237

The Directory